I wonder when Steve might set up an Ultra forum under the Tube Gear section. Anyway, I have this feeling my Ultra and ERRs (or at least some of them) will be done before my Toriis. Will make for interesting break in. Guess I could cob my Taboo from the headphone rig for a while until the Toriis show.

Actually, it appears hat almost everything is going to be done in a similar time frame. My first Torii arrived yesterday, my Radials shipped today, my Ultra is packed, and that leaves just the second Torii and the Zen SE84ZS.

I love both of those sets of speakers. They're different enough, and similar enough.

Right now I've been truly enjoying the ERRs. I've gotten wrapped up in their enveloping sound, and now that they're really broken in they're letting me hear the system in an excellent, different way, as I get myself slightly tangled in tube and power changes.

I truly enjoy the way they add dimension to the sound of my Blu-Ray player and my DVR. They let me just slip into the soundfield. They're excellent for most musical material as well. The HR-1 is sometimes the preferred vehicle for cd playback, because it brings a precision to well-done studio recordings and less expansive material such as string quartets, jazz trios and quintets, among others. But the ERRs bring a lot to the table even with these.

Ideally I would have both speakers somehow in the same spot and could wave them in and out of the signal path with a magic gesture. Hmmm. . . that's not going to happen. So for now the ERRs are here entertaining me in the living room.

Hey M: the ERRs are due here Tuesday....all 6 of them. Bob shared with me some of the build process, and some of the ideas he tried out while building my three pairs. It really is great to get hand-built equipment, built by the people who actualized their own ideas. Every single one of us truly has an individual work of art and science. One pair should be built "in reverse," with the tweeters firing backward, so the binding post and wiring remain behind the speakers. Can't wait to set them up.

I have been posting impressions and experiences on other threads in this, the ERR, and the Torii forums. The primary challenges with the system have been around convenience (source switching and input controls having been a significant issue). The system itself is amazing. Sound quality, soundstage, detail, tonality, dynamics, all just amazing.

I may have a microphonic tube or two in my Ultra (I put Nationals in the Ultra, allegedly platinum grade from Upscale Audio), so I am going to spend a few hours next weekend bird-dogging that.

PR, the break in on a tori w/ vcap is extreme in case you haven't found out, my sounded broken, garbled, like someone was banging on the turntable. The all of sudden 1200 hours later and 300$ in electricity bam it opened up and now I need to upscale all the other equipment. It's that amazing.

I'm still in the process of building a speaker kit with a 97db efficiency on the top and midrange driver only for my Tori III w/ vcap as the two 12" drivers on the bottom are pushed by their own 370 servo amp. I put some Jupiter caps in the crossovers of my Open Baffle speakers. To go along with that set up I will put a highly tweaked Oppo 95 from EVS or Tweak Audio still out at the job. Can't wait to see if all this so called fancy less expensive stuff is really any better or as good as the mega buck stuff. I am sure it's still all in the details. I hope to hear great things of the Ultra as once I can I want one to stomp all over this Meridian G68.I'm just around the corner from that, but do want some feedback on the Ultra.

If you put "Ultra" into the forum search engine and select Pale Rider as the "posts made by" you'll get a string of all his posts on the Ultra. I believe he is the only one who really has posted impressions as an owner.